London Bridge Station walk-through transformed into an urban oasis


Four show gardens made from recycled materials open at London Bridge Station.

Finding a garden in an unexpected location is a treat, as travellers who have visited the beautiful tropical planting at Madrid’s Atocha station will testify.

Commuters and visitors to London Bridge station this summer have the chance to stumble upon not one but four garden installations as they venture along the Victorian railway tunnel of Stainer Street.

New Forms Gardens – commissioned by Team London Bridge with support from Network Rail – was delivered by Cityscapes and follows their highly acclaimed 2013 Remix Garden project. This scheme takes a similarly creative approach by recycling materials from show gardens in to four new, temporary public garden installations.

Over the past 15 years Team London Bridge (a Business Improvement District) has delivered significant urban greening projects in the area, ranging from wildflower meadows and tree planting, to urban allotments and green walls. Previous collaborations between Cityscapes and Team London Bridge include the Gibbon’s Rent Secret Garden and Greenwood Theatre Pocket Park – both recipients of Society of Garden Designers awards. In addition to making the area more welcoming and attractive, all Team London Bridge urban greening projects are designed to maximise sustainability and positive environmental impacts. This one in particular also links in with their broader work delivering The Low Line - a new walking destination for London along the length of the mighty Victorian rail viaducts spanning Bankside, London Bridge and Bermondsey.

Reusing materials from the RHS Hampton Court Garden Festival, the New Forms Gardens highlight sustainable approaches to design, showing how hard landscaping materials can find innovative upcycled afterlives, and how plants can be used in unusual urban locations.

The four garden installations - designed by young, up and coming designers Ula Maria, Tessa & Caitlin McLaughlin, Alexandra Noble and Sarah Wilson - are on display until November in Stainer Street tunnel, within London Bridge Station.

The New Forms garden installations highlight how materials can be creatively reused to encourage cradle-to-cradle thinking and to develop new ways of designing green spaces that challenge people's ideas about their relationship to the urban environment. We hope they will engage people to think about how urban spaces can be sustainably designed in order to address pressing ecological and social issues, and emphasise the benefits of bringing people and plants together in the public realm, in order to create healthier cities.

At the end of the project the materials and plants will find new afterlives in local community projects.